Brown v. LAC and if LAC, which one? He does not know. what he will major in.
Brown is the easy choice. It’s an ivy, there’s more going on in the school and environs, the open curriculum is a plus for many.
Williams has the tutorial system, which is nice, but it’s in cow country.
Amherst is somewhere in between the two. Largeish college town, open curriculum.
Personally I’d go with Brown but who knows what the right choice is for your son.
Oh, and congratulations!
Does he prefer a university or lac? These are somewhat different experiences…he must have some preferences. Did he visit?
Unless he prefers an lac, I would also choose Brown.
If he prefers an lac I would choose Amherst, due to its more open curriculum and better location.
Are all of the schools affordable?
Academically I think they are equals. I would not choose Brown just because it’s an Ivy.
Williams is very isolated and intense. great for outdoor rec but has no town to speak of. I think people who choose Williams have to KNOW they want it or they run the risk of regret. Its students love it, of course, because they knew what they were getting into and chose it. It’s one of those places that if you have doubts, and equally good options, I would look elsewhere.
I think LAC’s have some real advantages in terms of focus on undergraduates, fewer TA-led classes…
Brown is probably more diverse and of course has a bigger student body and surrounding city.
Amherst area has some nice outdoor rec possibilites as well.
Your call but don’t go into it with an Ivy trumps all attitude.
Brown.
Amherst or Brown. If he wants the smaller environment of the LAC, definitely Amherst. Nice town, plus plenty of opportunities to take classes at the other colleges in the consortium. I know several kids at Amherst and they love it.
Personally, I think Brown is great too, but your son should choose based on his desire to be in the LAC environment or not. Even at Brown there are large lecture style classes. It’s a great school, of course, but the ability to form relationships with professors early on is going to be better at Amherst. Both colleges are going to set him up for life, and Brown being an Ivy isn’t necessarily going to get him a better degree or a bigger paycheck.
Where does he want to live for four years? They are all excellent colleges.
Williams is really out in the middle of no where.
Amherst is closer to somewhere, but is still small town.
Brown is in Providence, a city.
What is your child interested in majoring in? Any career aspirations? Brown is also going to have the edge in recruiting for some fields, e.g. tech and finance.
@momcheckingin: According to your first post on CC in 2008, you had a daughter planning to attend Brown University in Fall, 2009. Is this correct ?
To be blunt, you have not shared enough information about your son’s interests & preferences or about COA in order for one to make a reasonable recommendation.
I agree with @Publisher that it is hard to give good advice without more information.
We looked at this choice a number of years ago, looking for excellent schools with minimal distribution requirements for a brilliant but severely dyslexic kid. So, my knowledge is perhaps dated. For me, Brown was the least attractive of the three. Schools without strict curricula probably need to have either strong advisor systems or very small classes and an in loco parentis approach from professors so students don’t get lost. Brown’s classes are larger and so I was convinced that professors would notice a kid floundering or without direction. I did not get a sense from my conversations that the advisor system was strong. As such, for my kid, I had a strong preference for Amherst or Williams. I didn’t see a big difference between Amherst and Williams (they come from the same origin and have the same colors etc.). Williams might be better for math and Amherst for humanities but I am not sure. Williams used to produce a disproportionate share of museum curators.
I know some Brown alums who were very happy they attended and some who wish they had gone elsewhere, in part for the reasons above. I’m sure it is a great place for highly directed kids. I have had the sense that the school could be a warehouse of bright kids who don’t have to try that hard to get by but don’t really get what they could from a college education. Whether Brown works for your kid may depend upon how directed he is.
Location is just a personal choice. No place versus college town versus city. Providence is much nicer than it used to be. Can’t advise you there.
I went to Brown back in the dark ages but I’m not sure I agree with Shaw’s assessment about advising. Even back then I found the advising extremely hands-on, and it’s only gotten better and more involved.
I was lucky enough to be in something of an inter-disciplinary major so got to know faculty in a bunch of different departments and had mentors/advisors/faculty interventions starting freshman year. I was in seminars taught by two professors (12 students, two professors, THAT was intense) and large lectures with a few hundred students… but those were the star faculty with kid lined up in the hallways and sitting on radiators just to hear the lecture.
I am an active alum- and I think a kid has to make a conscious effort to phone it in in order to get lost at Brown. Is it possible? Yes. But even as Brown has built out its med school, invested in a bunch of grad programs and research institutes, it has become more LAC-like in its approach to the undergrads.
Williams still produces a disproportionate share of professionals going into the arts- not just museum curators, but auction house specialists, editors at the various publications that cover fine arts, and academics. It is indeed the Mafia of the art world.
OP- does your son have a gut feel about the “vibe”? I think Amherst and Brown are more similar than Williams is…
@blossom will be more knowledgeable about Brown. My impressions on advising and kids getting lost is somewhat old and was based upon folks we knew/talked to – not clear if there was skew at the time (maybe we knew some lost kids though we knew one very successful, happy self-directed kid as well).
My preference for the small schools was that professors sitting in small classes would quickly realize how bright ShawSon was and that would open up opportunities for him, which it did. In his first semester, he had a small class (10 kids maybe) in behavioral econ. He loved the class and the professor. ShawSon couldn’t make the professor’s office hours and so the professor set aside an hour a week just for him. I attended three of HYPSM and that would never have happened at any of my three schools. I don’t know if that would have happened at Brown. [Note: I asked ShawSon what he did in the hour with his advisor. He told me that he prepared in advance three questions taking off from what they had discussed in class that would cause the professor to say, “What a smart kid.” That probably kept the professor interested in devoting an hour a week to one kid.] That professor became his advisor he majored in math and econ but also had an interdisciplinary major in behavioral econ in which he wrote his thesis and in which he created several independent studies under the advisor.
In ShawSon’s case, heavy reading and writing fatigued him. Professors who realized how able he was were much more flexible than they might have been about extensions. While that made a significant difference for ShawSon and was part of my rationale for favoring Amherst/Williams, it might not be nearly as compelling a reason for your son to choose a small LAC over Brown.
I don’t know if your son has been accepted at all 3 and is trying to decide which to choose, or if he’s a junior and is trying to decide where to apply.
I prefer LACs but Brown is great. All great schools. I felt Williams felt very isolated but like the tutorials. Amherst is in a neat town. I don’t know that there is a wrong choice there and would go by things like if your child wants large or small school, city or more country side school, and departments of each in the majors/subjects in which your child is most interested.
This is almost a can’t-go-wrong choice (which of course are the hardest to make). I don’t know anyone who has attended any of them and not basically loved it. For the vast majority of kids qualified to get admitted to any of them, any of them could work fine. I don’t think “fit” is a real concern here, unless the geography matters a lot.
My kids tell me (and I half believe them) that there is an anti-intellectual streak to Brown, that it attracts and admits a lot of really smart kids who don’t care about school much. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be truly intellectual kids there, though. Amherst and Williams will have lots of well-rounded kids (and a high proportion of athletes) who care a lot about learning. My impression is that Williams is probably the most academically intense of the three colleges, but only by a hair; any individual student’s experience will be much more dependent on that student’s personal character than on any difference among the colleges.
For Amherst, the five-college exchange solves a lot of the course-selection problems LACs sometimes have, even if Amherst students (as the snootiest of the five student bodies) don’t make as much use of it as they could.
Amherst and Williams do fine in the job market. I wouldn’t worry about that at all.
Geography: I don’t think there’s as much difference between Amherst/Northampton and Providence as other posters do. Both are great and really vibrant. Providence is bigger, but it is still a pretty small city; the Amherst/Northampton area with its scores of thousands of students punches way above its weight for 18-26 year-olds. Both are served by Amtrak from NYC and Boston, which is a plus. Williams, yes, is more isolated, but with the Clark, Mass MoCA, and all the stuff that happens in the Berkshires in the warm half of the year, you can argue that the quality of its cultural environment is actually superior to either of the others.
University or LAC? If the answer is University it’s Brown. If the answer is LAC the next question is what made him apply to Amherst and Williams? The answers to that question should provide a good guide as to where to attend. What a wonderful dilemma to have.
First of all, it should be your child’s decision not yours. What appeal’s to him? Does he want a rural (W), suburban (A) or city school (B)? Does he want very small classes with close engagement with faculty (W) or more access to advanced coursework and graduate material (B)? Does he need more structure and requirements (A or W) or can he pick his own coursework (B)? The fact is all of these schools are prestigious and will be a good jumping off point. If you are totally focused on that first job after college Brown will probably give a leg up because of the Ivy thing. To be fair though, if your child needs a lot of help from his parent to pick a school, he may struggle with the freedom that Brown offers.
@henderson11, you say if the student needs more structure and requirements, pick A or W. Huh? Amherst has exactly ONE requirement, a freshman seminar. After that they are free to pick whatever classes they want. That is about as unstructured as it gets.
Very hard to know without more data. Brown is in Providence (small city), it’s very liberal and known for activism and free form learning ( non structured). Providence is pretty dynamic and close to Boston and NYC. Williams is in a very rural area. It’s beautiful and students make fast friends since there is not much around. Their alumni network is one of the best. This is particularly true in some fields. Amherst is a SMALL town (someone mentioned small town, I would call it tiny and meaningless especially when school is out of session). My kid saw it and said there is no way I’d ever go to school here. That’s after seeing that there were many schools around. Some kids just love it. It’s really personal preference. Amherst is a great school however. I’m not of the opinion that Amherst is dynamic or has much going on ( at all). It would bore me to tears if I was that age. But for kids who like staying on campus it might work. It is a great area for an outdoorsy kid who loves nature.
I think even if you child doesn’t know what they are definitely going to do they should have an idea of a handful of things they are interested in. From there they can check out programs and benefits of each.
Also, all these schools are equal. People who are knowledgeable know that Wiliams, Amherst and Brown are all academically excellent. I would not give the nod to Brown over Wiliams or Amherst. In some fields, William is quite well known. I know less about Amherst but it’s a great school as well.
Amherst and Williams are the Harvard and Yale of the Little Ivies. Of the two, Amherst seems to me to offer the best of both worlds, somewhere between Williams and Brown.
While Amherst is a small LAC, the 5 college consortium gives students access to a tremendous breadth of course offerings, especially with UMass just down the street.
With regard to location, Amherst has similar access to the outdoors as Williams. While the town is a true college town, Northampton is only minutes away, and it is the second biggest booking venue in New England (behind only Boston). In other words, the 5 college area has greater access to a big time music scene than you’d find in Providence. There are great restaurants in Northampton/Amherst as well. Lots to do here.
Without any more information about the student’s interest, Amherst is the easy choice for me.